


The Exquisite Barometer

by Vehemently



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Baseball, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-19
Updated: 2006-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:28:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1636487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's just a different way of looking. Like your grid, for looking at baseball.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Exquisite Barometer

**Author's Note:**

> What a journey! I've never written fic for a written source before, and this was a pretty awesome and interesting experience. Thanks for the opportunity!
> 
> Written for Blue_Yeti

Kirjava grew up gorgeous, long and slim like the Egyptian cats in the museum at Oxford. She had a narrow face, and high, swiveling ears on a long neck. Even when Will filled out to his adult size, her body spanned the width of his shoulders and her tickling tail curled down into his armpit. She would sit warming his neck, evenings while he did his work, and wash her forepaws delicately, one by one; and dig her needle-claws into his shoulder any time she felt his attention wander.

It was not terribly often that his attention wandered; under Mary Malone's tutelage Will had taken to studies as he had taken to hiding before. And that was how he found himself at a desk in a room in a city he did not know, the daemon Kirjava as always familiar around him. He leaned back and pressed his skull against her luxuriant warmth, turning his head sideways to see the complex play of her mottled dark fur in the lamplight. "You're no different," he told her.

"Course not," she whispered, touching her tongue to her nose. "Being in another country doesn't make you a different person."

They were in another country, in America in fact, and had arrived only two days before. Will thought about America the way people with lesser experience than he thought about death: terrifying, thrilling, unavoidable, something to be faced. He took in Tulsa, Oklahoma with the same serious frown that he had taken in advanced calculus, and with considerably more luggage. It was his first time abroad, and his first time in an American-style dormitory, and because he'd come early, nobody else was there.

"Pan told me about the Texan, Lee Scoresby," said Kirjava, raising her head and revealing the flash of white that marked her chin and throat. "Hester was his daemon, a hare."

Will thumbed through the folder of information about his summer program again. It was a good program, full of international students, and meant to be a hotbed for new cross-curricular research. Mary Malone had found it for him, and found the funding of it for him, and told him to take best advantage of what he might find here. There were a hundred professors here, doing real research, finding out more about this world every day. If he liked it, there was the distinct possibility that Will might end up here for advanced work, someday. "Like the kind of rabbits they eat in France?" he asked, absently.

"No," laughed Kir, and to hear a cat laugh is like the heady smell of the most full-bodied sweet liqueur. "A scrawny creature with big feet and dun-colored hair all over. She was quiet, Pan said, with one eye half-open, as if nothing would escape her view."

"And Texans and Oklahomans should be not so different," Will hoped aloud. The daemon slipped down from his shoulders and nosed her way into the pile of his underclothes which was sitting unpacked on his dormitory bed. Will stood at the window, looking out at flat, expansive Tulsa, washed in orange streetlights and empty concrete.

While he stood hoping, as if in answer, a car came round and stopped in front of his building. It was yellow -- a taxicab. All taxicabs were yellow, in America (except the ones that weren't). The light inside the car came on and someone was climbing out of it: a fellow student. He looked to Kirjava on the bed, an electrifying glance, and without speaking they agreed to race down the stairs to greet whoever it was.

It wasn't much of a race, after all. Anyway, Kir batted at his heels when he told her she cheated because she had four feet to his two. But then as the door opened he was suddenly shy again, and did not move.

Will presented an odd figure, lurking in the doorway to the stairwell. With the light behind him, his bulk became enormous and intimidating. His face was reduced to the plane of his strong brow and the outline of his jaw. He had fought a great deal, as a boy, ferociously and without quarter; he wouldn't dream of fighting now unless it was a killing matter, something desperate. He knew the power of his own hands.

A dark young man with a backpack came in through the front door, studying a sheet of paper he had pinned with a thumb to a box he was carrying. He muttered to himself and turned to the stairwell, and looked up natively, the way one will put out a hand to stop a door closing in one's face. Will stepped back, and tried to make himself smaller in the space.

"Oh, hello," said the dark young man, not intimidated at all. "I'm Dave Trujillo. I'm from Texas." He rested the box against his hip to shake hands with Will. He was easy on his feet, an athlete. They clasped hands, each pleased at the other's firm grip.

"Will Parry. I think you're my roommate for the summer."

Dave grinned at the exotic accent and the bulk of the man, and how he folded himself neatly out of the way. "Environmental engineering? Awesome. Where's the room?" Will went and fetched the last of Dave's things -- a duffel bag and one more box -- and they tramped up the stairs side by side, instantly comfortable in each other's space. Kirjava slipped up the stairs between their legs and had installed herself on the windowsill by the time they arrived to put down Dave's things.

***

Professor Harding's first lesson was that they would not be spending very much time in the classroom if it could be helped. "I hope you all brought raincoats, because I do not stand on fastidiousness. You want to study the environment, you got to be in it!" He laughed at his own joke, adam's apple bobbing, and the class deemed it acceptable to laugh back. Professor Harding was a humorous sight, in all: he was reedy and bald, with gray-white cottony hair about his ears; there were lines on his face and on his neck and on his long bony hands. He wore the sort of vest that comes with a hundred pockets, and several of these seemed full. "Now let's get some basics out of the way, and we'll be outstanding in the field before you know it!"

Will chuckled and rested his hand on the back of his daemon. She lay across the desk, enormous and luxuriant and not particularly a fan of weather of any kind. The Professor added, "Out, standing? Well I mean you can sit in the field if you've a mind to, but I don't take responsibility for what all kind of bugs you'll find in your shorts that evening." The Professor's drawl was corny, full of hard Rs and vowels that swooped. Will almost might have believed that was a joke too, except that one does not extend a joke into a detailed explanation of jet-stream atmospherics. A few equations marched across the board.

Next to Will, Dave scribbled notes. _No srs bugs round here,_ he marked for Will's benefit, then added, _locusts maybe_. Will raised his eyebrows dramatically at this last, knowing nothing of locusts but Egyptian plagues; and Dave smiled at his knowledge gap. Will was not hesitant in the slightest to admit to ignorance. Dave offered him the notepad and Will set to writing.

His narrow scratches said, _africanzd klr bees?_

Dave shook his head, then cocked it to one side. _dunno_ , he replied on the page. They brought their attention back to the classroom just in time to be set in a group of six for introductions. They all screeched their chairs around to face each other (Kirjava sitting up from her scrawl and stretching one paw to tap Will on his shoulder, from behind), and began to introduce themselves.

There were two girls, Joann and Reena, the former with a streak of purple in her short hair and the latter with long black tresses braided round her head like a South Asian Heidi -- more practical than lovely, on purpose. Danny and Kaz were roommates down the hall, Danny from Illinois and Kaz, smiling nervously, from Japan. They assessed each other as each one spoke: Danny had the mathematics; Joann the programming skills; and Reena had done fieldwork in biology. Dave explained his practical skills, flexing his hands as he spoke about building engines. They were good hands, long-fingered with short, round nails and calluses on the edges of the palms.

Will made sure his left hand was beside his thigh, out of view. He had lost the last two fingers on that hand so long ago he often forgot he'd ever had them; but many people found his amputation appalling, or worse, they noticed it suddenly and cried out, thinking they'd done something to make it happen just at that moment. The pain was over and done, long ago; but to spare everyone else's feelings Will usually made sure that his foreshortened hand was invisible.

"So what else do you do, besides studying?" asked Reena, challenging them all as she glanced down her prominent nose. "I tried surfing at my university, but I was terrible at it." This broke the ice considerably more than any resume details might have done, and it soon transpired that Kaz could make a cloverleaf out of his tongue, while Joann played guitar in a garage band. (She laughed uproariously to hear Will repeat it, _garage band_ , because the American accent said those words so differently.) Dave looked at the floor before admitting,

"Well, I'm a Division II baseball player." Dave said it like a confession, which is what it was: he was admitting to being a scholarship student, and to being an athlete, and to being so serious an athlete that all else in the college experience was ruled or affected by it. Everyone carries his or her own expectations of scholarship athletes, and few of those expectations are kind. Dave was not unjustified in his impulse to deny or minimize the impact of the game on his life; it was not a weekend lark, the way surfing was to Reena. In this credentialed and serious company, Dave feared that someone would laugh and ask him how a dumb jock could possibly be allowed into the classroom. But the dismissive chuckling for which he had steeled himself did not come.

"Aha," murmured Kirjava in Will's ear, as man and daemon alike watched Dave squirm. Will had seen the bats, of course, two pale wooden bats and one black metal one in the duffel bag two nights ago, but he had vaguely ascribed it to all those boys' own adventures, where someone brought a cricket bat along for no reason except it turned out to be useful as a weapon against some hissable villain. (Americans all seemed to believe they were characters in adventure novels.) It had not been clear, not till that moment, that the sport might be powerful, as powerful and everyday to Dave as two missing fingers were to Will.

Dave was sitting upright, with that shy pride of someone who has just declared true love or defended a thesis, and Will could not help smiling at him. "I haven't the slightest idea about that game," Will told him, to make him laugh and to put upon him the power and the obligation to explain.

Dave had opened his mouth to do so on the spot, when the Professor clapped his dusty hands and drew attention back to the front of the room. Instead he whispered, "I'll explain it to you," and they grinned at one another, before settling to learn whatever little the classroom had to teach them for the next month.

***

Things were much more interesting in the field, which was, at this instant, literally a field, nodding stalks of oats thigh-high. They were two hours out of the city, and in Oklahoma, that did not mean taking a room nearby but driving the whole way every morning and evening.

The idea was to map the topography of the area to the temperature, pressure, and humidity of the air, and produce a detailed microclimate map. This was the merest beginning of it, Will knew; placing the sensors according to GPS coordinates, checking that they worked: some of the rest would be data-crunching in computers, and some of it would be looking at satellite maps. Professor Harding was sturdier than he appeared, and loved to be outside as much as Will did. He was on a low hillock with Reena and Danny just now, gesticulating above his head as if demonstrating the size of hailstones.

But there were no hailstones today. Just a bit of warm rain, in squalls now and then, and suddenly the sun would break through the clouds and shine on the oats while they strove upward, still grey-green rather than gold. Kirjava chased white moths on the path in front of Will while he walked to the next sensor location. She turned suddenly and fixed him with that sloe orange stare and asked, "Silly boy, why don't you ask him now?"

Will could not think of a reason why not. He spoke over his shoulder to Dave: "Why aren't you playing baseball this summer? Isn't it a summer game?"

Since Will was the larger of the two, he carried the heavy spike to be fixed into the ground slung over his shoulder. Dave followed with the array of sensors in the crook of his elbow, like a child, and tools hanging from his belt. His walking was easy, fast, and he smiled from under his cap's bill. "It's _the_ summer game." Dave looked up into the sky beyond Will; it was vast, no mountains or hills in any direction to close of the view. On a clear day, it was lovely and terrifying; full of clouds it felt like looking at the sea. "My teammates are all on Cape Cod, or in Alaska or Hawaii -- summer leagues for college kids. The pro scouts go and watch, and that's how you end up a zillionaire with your own baseball card."

Will took Kirjava's significant eyebrow and did not ask the obvious question. They walked in silence another few strides, and Dave supplied the answer anyway. "I did that last year, after my sophomore year. The amateur draft is next week. After that, I have to decide whether to drop out of college and make zillions, or end up an engineer."

The intricacies of _amateur draft_ completely missed Will. He lowered his voice to find the properly solicitous tone: "You can't do both?"

Dave spat into the oats. "I don't think so."

That demanded a bit of silence. Kirjava came and rubbed her cheek on Will's ankle; he leaned just so to give her a platform of his forearm, and in two leaps she was on his shoulder, sitting tall. Will was reasonably sure that it was subtle, or anyway nobody had ever asked him what on earth he was doing. She cocked her head and looked directly at Dave, who of course could not see her.

"He wants to tell you more," she whispered, and a cat's whisper, directly into your ear, is a ticklish thing. Will tried not to twitch at the sensation. "But if you don't ask him, he won't, you great dullard." Kir licked his temple once, twice, and leapt down again, to pounce through the waving grasses.

Will said, "I don't mean to pry," signaling of course that he would very much like to do exactly that. But Dave was relieved to tell someone, to work it all out aloud instead of letting it bounce around in his head like a rubber ball.

"I sign a contract, that means I'm a pro, and I lose my scholarship," Dave explained. "And, the contract gives you money, so you could go to college on your own dime, but --" He hesitated.

Will coaxed him: "Is there not time for it?"

"I -- guess not," said Dave. "Not for most people. But, I mean, I play right now, and I've managed to major in engineering anyway, so, maybe I _could_ do that. If I just worked my ass off."

"You've got one year left, yeah?"

"Yeah." He counted his steps and the years ahead of him both at once. "If I didn't finish, and I played for like five years, and then I wanted to go back, I would have to repeat some stuff, I think."

Will paused and let Dave catch up. "Is it the money, then?"

Dave blushed a little, and tugged his cap lower over his eyes. "Depends on if a team wants me. Some guys, they pay a million dollars. I'm not that kind of player. But, even a hundred thousand --"

Will had no sense of money that large. Everything he'd needed in his life had been paid for out of his father's trust, or done without, and more of the latter until he'd begun to grow. He waited for Dave to continue.

"That would pay off my parents' house. And with enough left over for my sister to go to any college she wanted. I mean, not like Harvard or anything."

"But she wouldn't need a scholarship?" asked Will, quiet.

"Yeah," said Dave. They came to a stop and checked their coordinates. "Here's good." Dave stabbed at the oat grasses with the sensor's steel spike, intent on the ground, frowning. Will let him do it, counted the unnecessary holes in the soft wet soil till Dave had got over his fit of desperation and had found a single place for the spike to rest. Will hammered it, firm, into the ground. Its antenna waggled in the breeze, above their heads, nodding like the oats.

"I don't know what decision I'd make in your place," said Will, when Dave was done setting up the sensor. Dave grimaced at this honesty and made to turn away. Will tapped at the equipment, testing that it worked, and his eyes crinkled as it read out to him faithfully.

It was only then, as he watched Will tap at the little machine with his right hand, that Dave noticed Will was missing the last two fingers of his left hand, not shorn off at the palm but two tiny short stumps. They were very little scarred, and Dave had spent almost an entire week with Will without noticing. Dave's body galvanized, coming to the ready, as if there might be two fingers in the grass at his feet to snatch up and reattach. And then he caught himself and he laughed at Will, and at himself.

"How did I not notice that?" he asked, gesturing vaguely at Will's left side. He did not see, but Kirjava, who had given up on the white moths again, balanced on her hind paws to reach Will's stumps and lick at them. Will smiled down at her, and then at Dave.

"You're the first one who has," said Will. They shared a look, and moved on to their next task.

***

During their free evenings, Will took to impromptu games of football -- soccer -- with Reena and a pair of artificial intelligence students from Poland. Eventually, the games would attract more of the foreign students, as audience or as players, and Will might find himself sitting out the games he had started; but while the term was still early, he played. He and Kirjava both just ran up and down on the grass without ever seeming to affect the ball's trajectory, but it was a good chance to sweat and a good laugh now and then.

"Why is it," panted the taller of the two Poles, "all the foreigners play football, and none of the Americans do?"

Reena flopped down onto the grass with exaggerated exhaustion. "Americans are all off playing baseball. Be glad it's not winter, and then they would all be at basketball. Dreadful, claustrophobic sport." Reena presumed on her American university experience to say a great deal about what Americans were like.

"No hockey?" asked the shorter Pole. He had on a long face, as if he was discovering the streets were not paved with gold.

"Not in California," said Reena.

The Poles conferred in their language, and ventured, truculent, "Wayne Gretzky played in California."

Will cut in to avoid a conflict. "Anyway, Kaz is Japanese, and he's not here. I think he's with Dave over at the arena, throwing and catching. They play baseball in Japan."

"God," moaned Reena dramatically. "It's _really_ a boring game. Nothing at all happens and the players out in the field swat flies and pick their noses. And then something happens suddenly and they all run everywhere for no reason. And they all have to spit, all the time. I had a history course with one player last year, and he carried a glass jar to spit into -- in class! It was disgusting."

Will reflected that he had, indeed, seen Dave spit now and then. Not into a glass jar, and never inside a building. "How does the game work? I meant to ask Dave and never did."

"Oh, you hit the ball and run around the bases while the other team goes and fetches it," Reena explained, waving her hands. The sun was strong on her face, westering, and her skin shone rich and warm, like a new-struck coin. "And you do everything in threes."

"Sounds like cricket," said one of the Poles.

Will did not know cricket either, except what was on television now and then. Reena said, "Well it's just like cricket, only Americans need to think they invented everything. Have you ever noticed how only Americans look good in ball caps?"

"I have a ball cap," Will laughed. "Do I look a fool in it?"

But Reena did not answer him. She was looking past him, between the buildings of the quad. "Oh, oh, look," she cried suddenly, pointing over Will's shoulder. Everyone turned to follow her rigid finger, the awe on her face.

Just over the low buildings on the other side of the courtyard, the setting sun was gold shading to orange in front of a sky of red nimbus streaks. Still a little painful to look at directly, but little enough it could be ignored, especially to see its mirror-twin, some meters or inches or hundred miles distant: a sundog, an optical illusion, exactly twenty-two degrees to the right. It was dimmer, a rough-edged smudge in the sky, but still that numinous color, startling, throwing off vertical coronas in both directions.

Will whispered the scientific name: "Parhelion. Oh, it's gorgeous."

The two Poles were squinting into it, full of affection but nothing more than that. They were seeing something entertaining, like a dog walking on its front two feet or a student riding a unicycle. Will put his hand down on Kirjava's back, because she _would_ be there, coming to hand just when he needed her no matter how far she wandered.

"I've read about them," Will began, but Kirjava coughed gently and flattened her ears in Reena's direction. Reena was crying, tears rolling silently from her open eyes at its beauty, at that weird marvelous mirror-companion to the sun. He crawled closer to her, lowering his voice. "But I'd never seen one before in real life." Reena let him take her hand, and as he touched her she turned, inside, and could laugh, both in joy and at her own momentary paralysis. She glanced at him, gauging her shame and his kindness, and saw safety.

"Will," she mumbled, squeezing his hand. "Is there anything so beautiful as the world?"

"A tiny queen riding upon a dragonfly," laughed Will softly. Reena did not hear him.

She said, as if to the open air, unable to see Kirjava filling the space where she spoke: "The sun will be down in another few minutes. The others will be so sorry to have missed this."

***

"Since we are not scheduled for any eclipses during the term, yesterday's sundog may be as close as we come to freakish solar physics all summer!" shouted Professor Harding, with harebrained enthusiasm. "And you all missed it!"

Reena raised her hand, just to the level of her shoulder, to contradict him. Will was on the other side of the classroom, smiling uncontrollably. But the Professor barreled onward, bending his knees as if to leap:

"I know you all took math or else we wouldn't have let you in here. Parhelions are totally irrelevant to ecology, meteorology, and biochemistry, but tough shit! You, Danny, you come on up here to the board and let's work out how these things happen. Come on, now."

Danny spent the rest of the class period rubbing marker dust onto the heels of his hands as they worked out communally why the sun would have a reflection of itself in its own sky. It was elegant, really, the pitiless physics laid out in loping handwriting on the board. Will saw Kaz finger-writing in the air, anticipating the next step in Danny's work, and nudged Dave.

 _you & kaz busy last night?_ he scribbled. Kirjava jumped over to Kaz's desk, swiping at his fingers gently as if they were boxing each other. Will swallowed a laugh.

Dave was smiling back. _batting practice. turned sudden & saw it._ Each held the other's gaze for a long moment, each deep in the memory of it, each pleased that the other could understand the experience. But Dave couldn't hold onto it; soon his smile faded and he glanced at the board, where Danny was stooping to fit one last line of equations.

Will asked, _you OK?_ Dave just shook his head, made a little wave of his hand. He liked that Will would ask, and liked better that Will would accept a non-answer. They would be spending the afternoon in the modeling lab, looking up air pressure tables; Dave resolved to explain it to him then.

Will took that non-explanatory grimace with the patience that he took data-gathering: time was not to be rushed, and neither was Dave. But he did not need to wait long, as it turned out; Dave skipped lunch and seemed likely to skip out on the modeling lab as well. He burst in suddenly, banging the door and startling Will so that his neat map-line on the computer screen became a jagged stroke.

Dave was in a state, tense in every muscle and on the cusp between joy and worry. He came and sat down at the workstation next to Will's, and moused about the screen blindly, resolving in himself what to say and what to think. Will did not ask anything, just waited patiently, erasing the messy line he had drawn. After a minute or two, Dave turned to him and said, "Can you keep a secret?"

Will made a funny face. Secrets were something he knew intimately.

"Dude, I forgot, course you can." Dave shifted in his seat, afraid he might vibrate right out of the chair. He leaned close, to whisper, even though they were alone in the room. "Six hundred forty-second pick," he said, with awe. "I got drafted." He put his hands up to hide his face and flipped off his baseball cap.

Will did not know quite what to do. Kirjava, sitting across his shoulders, twitched her tail in confusion. He inched his chair a bit closer, not to touch, just to be nearby and available. "You mean the army?"

At this Dave burst into amazed laughter. "No, dude." He could not finish, could not even close his mouth, as if all the surprise had come to him at once. "I got -- the Amateur Draft. The Cincinnati Reds drafted me. They want me to play ball for them." Dave punched the air: he could conquer the draft, and so could conquer anything, even atmospheric equations.

Will caught on and laughed too, relieved. "Congratulations! Your parents' mortgage, yeah?"

At this reminder Dave fell silent, long-faced. "I dunno." He did not know anything, truthfully: he did not understand contracts, or money, or how people might overwhelm him and or try to take advantage of him. His future loomed, terrifyingly full of promise and danger. "I was just. I saw my name on ESPN2. They scrolled through each team's picks, you know that crawl on the bottom of the screen, and I saw my name." He paused, reality sinking in. "Oh my god, where is my cell phone? I have to call my mom!"

Dave turned out to have forgotten his cell phone, but Will had his. He politely pretended deafness while Dave spoke to his parents and mirrored their happy tears. "I was kind of scared they wouldn't take me," he said, hoarse. He held his free hand up against his head, as if warding off attention or blows. "Yeah, they got all the way through yesterday, and I thought maybe they didn't want... Yeah, well, I hope so. ...No, I'm not important enough for them to call me already. They're busy talking to their number one pick right now."

Will would not eavesdrop openly, but Kirjava would. Dave said, "I don't have to make a decision yet, though," and Kirjava slid her eyes sideways to see if Will had heard it.

***

Midsummer morning. Will calculated it carefully, accounting for the time difference and Daylight Savings and anything else that might matter. He sat by the window and watched the sun rise at four, Kirjava in his arms. They both wept a little, just a few tears for remembrance, or he did. Cats do not weep but make little high quiet cries, like hunger or like loneliness in a large room. And then he laughed at himself, stroking his daemon, sitting in socks and pants on a windowsill at dawn. But instantly he forgave himself the sentimentality, and let the rising sun warm his cheeks while he watched. He smiled into that brightening gleam and settled Kirjava in his lap so she could sleep, curled tightly. He did not go fetch himself coffee, just watched the endlessness of the pink sky and the clock, and when the hour had chimed six bells from the chapel on the other side of campus he wiped his dry face at last.

Stiff, sore from sitting on a wooden sill for an hour, Will nudged Kir till she grumped and stretched her sinuous back. He unkinked his knees and climbed down from the windowsill, fetching his mobile phone. He left Dave sleeping in the other bed, and hid in the dormitory bathroom to call home.

Mary Malone answered on one ring. Of course she would be expecting him. "Hello, Will. We're just back from a picnic."

Mary was the only other person in this world who used the plural to speak of herself, and that only to Will. Kir was listening carefully, perched in her usual spot on his shoulder. "Is it sunny, then?"

"Is it ever not sunny on Midsummer's Day in England? The Queen decrees it so." Mary's laugh was always startling: she could be so formal, standoffish. She and Will had discovered over the years that they were more alike than not. She added, "We brought your mother along too."

Will held his breath.

"She said it was a suitable place to think of your father, so she came willingly. Really, Will, I would not have expected her to hold up without you, but she's done quite well."

Kirjava bashed him in the forehead with her cheek, rubbing him rough and sudden, like lovers clicking their teeth together by accident. Will sniffled and said, "Thank you. I am glad to hear it."

"I told her the marzipan story," said Mary Malone. "While we ate sandwiches and fed the sparrows the crumbs. She said, you'll like this, she said that if marzipan was that stimulating, then I really did need the sex."

Will choked, turned it into a laugh. "She hates marzipan."

"It's the first joke I think I've ever heard from her," Mary added, helpful.

"I would say that I am pleased, but -- my mother, joking about sex?"

"We old bats get on somehow," came the dry rejoinder. "Look, overseas calls are expensive. I'll let you ring off now. Go on to your classes and learn all you can. You can come home and teach an old woman how wonderful this world really is."

"Oh," said Will, bursting with his new knowledge. "It's a marvel. It's -- " He breathed, Kirjava wordless beside his ear, and could not think of how to say it all.

"I know," said Mary, full of the same thing. "I know."

***

Six hundred forty-two," said Will, medatively. "So there are six hundred players they wanted more than you?"

Dave could laugh, now the edge was off his wonder and fear. "Pretty much, yeah. The money goes way down once you get to my level."

It was a bright, high Friday afternoon and the Professor had winked and signed out the class for research into the air currents of rawhide leather at high altitude. They rested their bottoms on gray wooden benches, staring through the chain-link fence at teenaged boys in a summer touring league. Reena was the only one who would not eat hot dogs ("You don't even know what they're made of!" she said) but cotton candy soothed her discontent. Bits of blue filmy sugar were stuck in her hair, in the back where only Will and Dave and Kaz could see.

They sat side by side, enjoying the sun on their faces and the wind for a bit of cool, and Dave thought: _This might be my job, soon._ He shrugged at Will, and began to indoctrinate him into the great and mystical pastime of baseball. Luckily, Kaz needed no convincing: he'd brought his own scoresheet, which, except for the stuff in Japanese, looked exactly like an American scoresheet.

"Okay, here is the thing. Baseball is not a sport. It is the outcome of a series of mathematical predictions." Will eyed him, on the edge of laughter. "No, seriously. Look, each pitch to the batter is an event." A pitch came to the batter at that moment, and right by the batter, while the batter stared open-mouthed at what really wasn't that impressive a fastball. Kaz made a hash-mark in the proper place on his scoresheet.

"Each pitch is an event, and it has a certain number of allowed outcomes. He could have a strike, a ball, a hit-by-pitch, or make contact. Each one of those outcomes is in turn a proposition for a further outcome: if it's a third strike, then he's out. If it's a fourth ball, then he walks to first base. If he makes contact, then it's either fair or foul, and somebody catches it or doesn't catch it, and he makes it to first base or doesn't." The batter swung at a curve ball that had failed to curve, and it flew in a respectably straight line into the outfield, bouncing in the grass while the centerfielder chased it. The batter did make it to first, and hovered in the basepath before deciding that he couldn't safely take second as well. He trotted back to the base and wiped his hands on his thighs.

"I miss much?" asked Professor Harding, swooping in with their hot dogs. He handed them off while Dave shook his head and Kaz showed off the scoresheet.

"Dave was just explaining to me that baseball is actually the many-worlds hypothesis of theoretical physics," Will said, and got a rough elbow in the ribs as reply.

"I was just telling Will, this is a very scientific procedure." Dave accepted a hot dog. "Kaz is taking those notes because he can do it all in a shorthand, right on one page, and describe the whole game. There are only a certain number of things that can happen, and all of them have been anticipated in the scoring system. You can look at a scoresheet years later, and if it was done right, you can say exactly what happened in the game, from start to finish."

"Mm," said Kaz, eating his hot dog. A yellow thumbprint smeared the edge of his careful handiwork.

Will accepted his lunch as well, examined it carefully. He had never seen mustard of quite that yellow a shade before, and wondered if it mightn't be paint. Kirjava, on his shoulder, took a sniff and disdained it instantly; although she was quite willing to lick the catsup off his fingers, later. Will let Dave's gentle patter fall on his ears like mist while he examined the field before them. It was all outrageously colorful, vibrant grass and rich brown dirt and neat white lines painted from the focal point of home plate out into the infinity of the outfield. The boys playing were all leggy and active, calling to each other, alert on the pitcher whenever he threw.

Professor Harding folded the last of his hot dog into his mouth and added, "Oh yes. You can create a Markov model to describe game-level outcomes. All the hits and the strikes are the same hits and strikes for the last hundred years. It's really an informaticist's dream. There's nothing the game hasn't thought of."

"What about if it's a night game and the power goes out?" asked Joann, from the row in front.

"Treat it like a rain delay," answered Dave, sagely.

"What if..." Joann put on a devilish smirk, "what if a fan runs out on the field and steals the ball away?"

"Fan interference. I think it's an automatic double, but there might be umpire's discretion on that. The fan gets arrested." Dave grinned at her.

Joann could not think of any further scenarios, or could not think of any that Dave would not be able to handle. Will imagined Dave on that field, wearing those uniform white trousers, getting grass stains on them as he tumbled all over the field. "What position do you play?"

"Second base." Dave pointed out where the second baseman stood (not actually very near second base at all), explained about left-handed hitters, and who might fill what gap when stopping a ball from escaping to the outfield. The boy at bat was left-handed, waggling his rump at them as he waited for the pitch. When it came, he knocked it hard, bouncing, back through the middle of the field. "Look, look, see?" Dave pointed while the pitcher ducked and the shortstop took one step and stopped the ball. He tossed it to the second baseman, who just knew to be standing on second base, and who made an elegant, pivoting leap over the sliding baserunner to throw out the batter at first. "Double-play!"

Will had no idea what a double-play was, but competent bodies working together was something he understood. The shortstop and the second baseman tapped gloves, thanking each other for a play well done.

Kaz showed Will the scoresheet: lines on the diamond, and overtop it the letters DP. "Two outs," he said. "Each team gets three in an inning. Three outs, nine innings, twenty-seven outs in a game. Three numbered bases, three outfielders, ninety feet between bases."

"Sounds like a Dan Brown novel," said Reena. She had finished her cotton candy.

A third batter was up. He was right-handed, so he faced them all from the other side of home plate. He was long and sturdy, like Dave; tall and with massive powerful thighs. Will stole a glance sideways: Dave held his hands together as if he grasped a bat himself. The batter tapped home plate once, and then stood ready with the bat in a rhythmic twirl behind him. The pitcher squinted, frowning, then nodded his head and reared back. The ball came in, terribly fast and dangerous-looking -- Will could understand why they wore helmets -- and with a great marvelous thundering wallop the ball lifted off the bat and flew, high and far and piercing in that cloudless sky.

Dave was on his feet, bellowing, and Kaz beside him. Will looked up at them, at the unalloyed joy of a witnessing a home run. Dave shook his fists and shouted, "Awesome! Awesome!", while Kaz clapped a hand against his clipboard and then noted down what had happened on his sheet. Everyone else sat down and Dave was still standing, unconscious of the fierce pleasure on his face.

Kirjava stuck her nose in Will's ear. "I think he likes this game."

Dave sat down. " _Man,_ I love this game," he said. Will did not doubt him in the slightest.

Reena, one row down, let out a long-suffering sigh.

***

July came like high noon, stark and sweaty and tense. Only another eight days, and they would all be dismissed back to their homes or to travel the world or do whatever it was serious young students did.

"Why don't you look at daemons?" asked Kirjava. Will was sitting on a rock by the tarmac, typing in calculations on his laptop. Kirjava was giving herself a dust-bath, as if she could fool the sparrows into coming close.

"Why what?"

"If only you would, we could help Dave decide. You're so dratted polite." Kir arched her back and another cloud of dust flew upward.

Will laughed. "You sound like Pan when you say that."

"I sound like Lyra, you mean. _Pan_ was the shy one of those two."

"Why do you want me to see his daemon?"

"It's settled, of course. It's got to tell something about him, something even he might not know. We could help him decide, if we knew."

"I suppose I never realized that you can't see them without me."

"Course not," Kir said huffily. "We've got to see them together."

"Well," said Will, thinking aloud, "I don't think it's proper, do you? He can't see you, so if I did look, I would know more about him than he does about me. I would have an advantage over him. Like knowing the questions on an exam, before anyone else does."

"You told Mum about Margaret Thatcher having a bristle-boar for a daemon."

"I'll never meet Margaret Thatcher. And anyway, it was funny."

"If you could do maths in your head, great sums no one else could do, would you still use scratch paper on an exam? You're so bloody _fair_ , Will, it makes my head hurt."

"I don't --"

"If you could throw and catch a baseball better than anyone, wouldn't you play?"

Will did not know what to say to that, nor how to react to being chided by a part of himself. Kirjava switched her tail at him, testy, and in his confusion he turned back to the data.

Joann and Reena jogged up to him together, gossiping breathlessly about the incompetence of the team on the other side of the hill. "Oh Will, said Reena. "They've done the sensors all wrong, all of them off by half a second or more. Someone's got to tell Professor Harding." They elected him with their eyes, squinting at him.

"Or," he said, careless, "you could take the van and go fix them yourselves, and not tell a soul." Reena and Joann gave him blank looks. "D'you want it done properly? Go ahead and do it. The Professor keeps the keys under the mat in front."

There were times, and this was one of them, when his classmates regarded Will with an exalted kind of fear, guessing vaguely that he had braved something terrifying and come out the other side but with no idea how accurately they had guessed. All they knew was that he could speak with ease about things they hardly contemplated, and when he did he seemed old, strange, not a college student at all but some weathered adventurer. But soon the moment passed and Will looked up not even realizing this distancing moment had occurred. And the moment was over and everyone could think of again him as Will Parry, the standoffish student; but they only ever half-forgot their wonder.

"All right," said Reena, with an upraised chin and an unconvincing attempt at truculence. "All right, we'll save the day."

"I'll have your data entered for you before you're back," Will told them. Kirjava wriggled again in the dust.

***

The day was overcast, a pleasant familiarity for Will, but Professor Harding was ill-at-ease. "Tornado weather," said the old man. "I can always feel it, behind my eyes. It's the barometric pressure -- any of you broke any bones?" Dave raised his hand, but no one else did. "Well, you'll know it someday."

It was their last day with the sensors, their last day in the field. Soon they would be packing up and leaving long-term service packs on each of the sensor spikes, for Professor Harding's fall class to examine. The experiment would live as long as free undergraduate effort could keep it. Will was put to the hard labor, inventory and restacking all their old equipment in the back of the van, all the while keeping an eye out for funnel clouds he had only ever seen in pictures.

"If the sky goes grey-green, you'll know it's coming," said Professor Harding, scenting at the air. "And the wind's just so, an unpleasant feel to it. You just get a feel."

Instead of a feel, Will had Kirjava, lazing on the roof of the van and swearing with great solemnity that she was watching the sky at every instant. Unlike most days, there were not birds for her to entertain herself with; and Will shook his finger at her when he caught her falling off to sleep.

The wind grew stronger as the batches of equipment came in. Reena's braids were coming undone, long strands whipping at her face. The air was warm, humid, but students came in shivering under their sweat, hurrying to finish before a storm did come. Kirjava noted the darkening of the clouds to the southwest, how they seemed to crowd together as if queueing for a bus; but that was ordinary cloud behavior. None of them, looking to the sky, would have expected such a shock.

One doesn't think it: it is the thing that happens to Art Deco skyscrapers and to massive suspension bridges and -- Will happened to be looking directly at Danny as he tramped across the field, sensor slung over his shoulder. Dave walked next to him and Joann behind, all of them long strides down the incline of the low rolling hill, and Will saw them all only for a moment. The lightning that struck the sensor's topmost point also struck him flashblind.

He staggered, blinking, and a gold-green Mandelbrot pattern overwhelmed his vision while Kirjava howled, leaping, landing somewhere near his feet. Reena screamed nearby and he reached out to her, searching.

"Will, Will," she cried, grasping his elbow, turning quickly from the shock of it to real, serious worry. She let him go and tore away from him, left him behind. There was shouting on all sides, now.

Bewildered, Will asked, "What -- what did I see?," stumbling in a bright daze. Kirjava knocked against his shins and he leaned down, offering her his forearm. The cat daemon took two leaps and was on his shoulder, whispering directions.

"Forward now, ten more steps. Danny and Dave and Joann are on the ground. They've been shocked. Harding is with Danny." Will strode forward through the oats that tickled his legs, kicking them down. _Shocked_ , he thought, and then realized that it was the electrical kind she meant, the kind that killed. They'd all been clustered about the sensor when it was struck.

"On your knees here," Kir directed, and Will fell, hands out, to curl his fingers into the belt loops of Dave's jeans. He stared hard at where his hands ought to be, thought he discerned something through the golden haze burned into his eyes. He found his way by touch up Dave's body, felt the chest cavity balloon under his hand as Dave took a breath. It was a terrible relief, to fall on Dave's neck and find the pulse, to ghost over his face and find his mouth open, his ears intact, no smell of burn though the ozone was thick everywhere.

Ahead of him and to the right, a meaty thump: terrible noise. Professor Harding called to someone -- probably Reena -- and thumped again, and on the second blow Will knew it for what it was: a fist swung hard against the breastbone, the first try to restarting a heart that has lost its rhythm. Someone was dying in that field.

"Oh," muttered the mouth under Will's hand, humid breath and the slow return of consciousness. Calm came over him until there were no other tasks in that field: only Dave, only the task in front of him, the task he could perform. Will stared hard at that face, rested his fists in the grass on either side his head, and stared hard, and Dave's face swam into view. It was an ordinary face, after all, especially without a waking consciousness behind it; its animation was in the intelligence and sensitivity of it. Will felt smarting tears fall as his eyes strained past the afterimage of the lightning strike, saw splashes of water land on Dave's cheeks.

"Wake up, Dave, wake up!" he chanted, while behind him Professor Harding was chanting out numbers, counting heartbeats. Dave's brow creased slowly. Will did not dare look to anything else, so it was with amazement that he perceived Kirjava approaching, dancing up across Dave's chest, between their bodies, rubbing her back against Will's collarbone while her careful jaws deposited something on Dave's neck. She licked that thing, and licked Dave once on the cheek, and took up a position on Will's back, peering down over his shoulder.

Now Will saw what it was: an owl, a tiny owl with long yellowish legs, a haystack of feathers curling carefully against the underside of Dave's jaw. "I don't know her name," Kirjava told him, disapproving. "You should name her."

She was so small, a sturdy round body the size of a fist. She cheeped, frightened or confused or in pain, Will could not tell. He cupped a hand around her to keep her warm, and as he did so, Dave opened his eyes.

"Oh," said Dave faintly, astounded. "I think I just got hit by lightning."

Will did not even think. "Give me your hand, Dave." He took Dave's right hand in his left, gave him a moment to feel that two-fingers grasp. He lifted Dave's right hand and brought it up to the owl, who was twisting her neck, beginning to look around. "I don't know what she's called, but she's a small funny owl, with running legs and stripes on her belly. She's on your --"

"-- Oh," whispered Dave, near tears. "There she is." He sank his fingers into her feathers, felt their slightly oily weft, how they sat on her back and on her small flexible wings and in tiny ridges on her face and she let him trace her all over with his fingertips. Touching her carefully, he raised himself up on one elbow and held her so he could see her.

It was not like a thing appearing, as in a magic trick, with a swoosh and a swirl of dark fabric; nor was it like turning on a light in a dark room. She had always been there; Dave had always seen her; but he hadn't _seen_ her until that moment. It was as if he had lived to the age of twenty-one knowing only a flat painting of a field, and suddenly his painting had been replaced with a real field, rippling and shushing, and the girl-bird in the middle of it. His girl-bird, himself, disheveled and flustered, preening her feathers to regain her dignity. "What's her name?" he asked Will, in wonder.

"Adelaide," said Will instantly, and as smoothly as he knew how. A witch had named his daemon, a wise-woman with vast insight. He was only a silly undergraduate, but he was all the expert this world knew.

"Adelaide," repeated Dave. "Awesome." In his grasp, she waggled her wings and fixed him with a round-eyed yellow stare.

"Lie down again," she told him, and Dave did not disobey. She settled into the curve of his neck again, stroking his jaw with her hard beak. Dave looked up at the sky and wept and grinned and wept and held Adelaide close.

"I think it's going to rain," Dave said.

Kirjava licked Will on the neck, in just that ticklish spot, before nipping him on the ear and drawing his attention to everyone else. The gathering was dispersing, or coming into some kind of order; Professor Harding knelt with one hand flat on Danny's chest and with a turtle peeking out of one of his many pockets. Curled limp around Danny's wrist, a garden snake, wheezing at her narrow escape. Reena dashed past Will, returning from the van with the first-aid kit clutched to her breasts. At her knee galloped a long-haired billy goat, sturdy and glossy grey. Kaz sat with Joann, supporting her where she sat gasping, while his lizard conversed with her hedgehog.

"The rescue people said they're coming," Reena shouted, out of breath, and fell to her knees amid the throng of cacophonous life. "They'll be here soon," she reassured them all. From everywhere in the field, people came running, all the other students and their professors arriving to help, trailing their daemons like an exquisite menagerie.

***

Dave slept the rest of the afternoon under Kirjava's watchful authority (as she pointed out to Will, she knew as much about sleep as anyone) and Adelaide slept with him, burrowing into his armpit and fluffing her feathers. Will came back from the library with the proper book, got one glance of her, and laughed at himself.

"She's a burrowing owl, of course," he told Kirjava, who smiled (as much as cats can smile) and yawned. "They dig nests in the ground and hunt day or night." He showed her a page in the birding guide he had borrowed, full of illustrations of barrel-chested avians. The burrowing owl stood in the corner on its spindly yellow legs, dwarfed by its more famous sisters. "An owl is wisdom, do you think? Only she has those legs, too: wisdom and speed both."

"Wise enough to decide between engineering and a career in sport, or speedy enough to do both at once?"

"I don't know," Will said. Knowing a daemon did not, it turned out, make or unmake a decision, only gave vivid immediacy to an individual's complexity. It confounded him and pleased him and made him shake his head.

"What were the librarians' daemons?" Kir asked, and twitched her tail.

Will paused. "It still feels -- impolite." That tail twitched faster. He confessed, "The man at the reference desk had a parrot, and I did not want him gossiping, so I went to the little woman who taught us how to use the database. Mrs. oh, what's her name, Mrs. Waddell. Her daemon is a squirrel, brilliant red and with great tufts at his ears."

Kirjava closed one eye at him before rearranging herself on the windowsill. On the other side of the glass, slow rain was pattering, the last of the storm that had swept through that noon. "We shall keep looking, Will. It's another way of knowing the world, no less than those sensors you've spent so much time staring at."

There was not much argument to be had. His roommate lay in a narrow bed with an owl tucked next to his chest. Seen things could not be unseen. "Reena called from the hospital," Will said. "Danny's mother is driving down to see him. Will you be all right watching Dave for a while yet?"

Sleepy hoots emerged from Dave's bed. "Yes, I think I can," Kir said, and set to washing her face.

"Will," Dave mumbled, thumbing at one eye, "there's a cat talking on the windowsill."

"Imagine that," Kir said.

"I've got to go check on the others," Will said, and sat on the edge of Dave's bed. "You and Adelaide should sleep, recover your strength. I'm leaving Kirjava to keep an eye on you, and she can call on me if something's wrong, no matter where I am."

Dave smiled, shy. "She's yours. Like Adelaide is with me. I get it."

"Everyone's got one," said Will.

They were smiling at each other like fools, and no one to chide them or shame them out of it. "How did I not notice that?" Dave asked, and they could not control their laughter.

But Dave was sore and still tired, and petered out after a moment or two. He cocked his head sideways, exactly as an owl might Will realized belatedly, and asked, "Can you teach me to see that? Like, to see other people the way I can see you?"

"I think so," said Will, unsure suddenly. But Dave looked at him with faith and willingness, open to the experience. Will firmed himself and nodded. "Later. Now, you sleep."

Dave was obedient, and snoring, before Will could let himself out of the room. Kirjava stayed behind, comfortable, on the windowsill.


End file.
